Drive Revenue for Your Brand with a Single Source of Truth PIM Solution

Managing product information for businesses or brands can be tiring because of the numerous SKUs and organizational effort required to put data in place for effective online marketing. If you are a growing or an already large enterprise with no ground database preparation, things tend to go haywire at a point, and you must strive to keep up.

The overwhelming tasks of manually going through excel sheets for vast amounts of data could result in impossibly scattered product data with no control over the database. There is always the possibility that you would lose track of your organizational data, which could invariably lose customers’ confidence in your brand.

Businesses must employ Product information management solutions to avoid such problems. A PIM takes the stress off by providing you with a single source of product data, which increases your marketing team’s productivity and drives revenue for your business.

PIM is excellent for digital companies that want to invest in new technologies that will help them reduce the problems associated with product databases while at the same time helping them to be more customer-centric.

Below is everything about PIM and how employing a single source of truth for your product data will drive revenue for your brand.

What Is PIM?

PIM stands for product information management; a process businesses use to organize and store their product information and assets, from the product launch to marketing.

PIM creates a single source of truth for online merchants, thus allowing every member of their marketing team access to updated product information.

Signs That Your Business Needs a PIM Solution

SKU Management

It takes a long time to manage thousands of product SKUs as each SKU has its own set of information, including pricing and style and product size, color, and material, which could add up to hundreds of data points for a single product!

Manually keeping track of all of this data is time-consuming and could result in data loss.

However, PIM can resolve the stress of managing a high number of SKUs. PIM makes it easy to keep track of and organize all data by creating a centralized source, ensuring accuracy and consistency.

High Return Rates

Most e-commerce owners face a common challenge: product returns resulting from low-quality or incorrect product information. Online shoppers now demand excellent service and only go where they can get that.

Since customers do due research on products before making a purchase, it is only fair to decide that your product returns, which results from their dissatisfaction, stem from the differences between the product information you showcased and the product delivered. 22% of buyers will return your products if it looks different from what they saw online.

Using PIM software will give you comprehensive visibility into your product data at every stage of the product’s lifecycle.

Business Growth

Scaling your business will require that they expand into selling through different channels at some point, including mobile. 42.9% of e-commerce sales are predicted to come through mobile come 2024.

Selling through multiple channels will increase your brand awareness and conversion rates in different marketplaces. However, other media have additional data requirements that you must follow to effectively cater to your customer’s expectations.

PIM provides each channel’s creation and essentials that enable businesses to tailor their content to meet these channels’ expectations for effective marketing.

5 Ways a Single Source of Truth Can Drive Revenue for Your Brand

1. Ditch the Excel Sheets

PIM has features that serve as excel sheets to enter the product information, eliminating the need to fill or update excel sheets manually.

If you have been using excel sheets to operate your online business before now, you must change it as you need a more sophisticated marketing system to excel in the online marketing space. Negligence would lead to attempts to complete or correct product data instead of concentrating on beating the competing marketplace.

Manually updating excel sheets for your product is a promising venture. However, there is no assurance that they have protection against human errors. Humans tend to overlook minute details that a computer or software would have no problems detecting in updating data. In addition, research states that 88-90% of excel sheets on the internet contain errors.

Entering information into excel sheets would result in inaccuracy, especially if you manage a business with an extensive SKU, and one error can significantly impact your brand. One of the focuses of customers while researching or checking out a product on your product page is accurate product information. If this is found incorrect or unclear, it will deter customers from purchasing from you. It can also lead to a significant return rate, an issue every online marketer would rather not have.

Some of the ways through which employing PIM to replace excel sheets help your business include:

User Experience

It’s challenging to keep track of 1000s of rows. More product attributes impair usability, making working with hundreds of attribute columns and many more product records challenging.

Furthermore, keeping track of categories, attribute groups, and families in each cell becomes more challenging, especially when maintaining the same identity. Product information management software eliminates this confusion by categorizing pages for easy identification.

Data Validation

Data validation is complex on the Excel sheet, especially for products with numerous attributes. It will get tiring for the personnel in charge of this task. Still, there is always the chance that incorrect data will be input, eventually leading to invalid information or output.

Each functional item in PIM has its page, and you can achieve data validation by simply following the validation rules on the system when generating products attributes.

2. Data Transfer Made Possible

It is often difficult to transfer excel sheet data to your other e-commerce websites and ERP software. Not all platforms can accept data in excel format. As a result, marketers go through to a repeating file conversion task, which could become exhausting.

PIM solution comes with excellent API features that enable file sharing and access between integrated ERP software, other e-commerce websites, and sales channels. In addition, PIM comes with a filter that ensures information only gets to the desired destination.

3. Find Product Data and Digital Assets Easily

By creating a single source of truth and categorization for your store, you no longer have to search through tons of files to retrieve product information or digital assets. Digital assets are any digital materials businesses own to effectively illustrate a product that helps an individual make an informed purchase. They include files, videos, product images, audio, animations, or graphics.

Imagine a scenario where a customer sees a product you have put out for sale but needs more explanation from your sales personnel. The best PIM software database serves as a quick reference source for your personnel to get information or more digital assets to clear any doubt such customers might have.

PIM integration with Digital Asset Management implementation in your e-commerce store helps centralize your product information and digital assets, thus ensuring that you no longer expend much energy on information retrieval.

You can have all your marketing resources stored in one place through PIM asset management, and your files and other digital assets only become more findable with subsequent database increases.

4. View Complete Version History and Revert When Necessary

When you enable versioning in PIM, it allows you to store, track, and restore product data whenever they change. Through it, if you wish to revert to the old version, PIM makes it an easy process to undergo.

Unlike Excel spreadsheets, every PIM comes with an automatic backup option that creates database backups regularly and stores them in many virtual places. Users do not need to be concerned about data loss because everything will be safe and secure.

5. Enriched Product Data

PIM comes with automated features which enrich your product data and ensure you only broadcast quality product information on your product page.

To drive revenue from your mobile store, you must give customers quality product content as customers now expect it. Anything less than top-notch will push them towards your competitors who are taking every measure to ensure that their web page visitors and customers leave satisfied. Top-quality data is error-free and is ready to be read by the public. Some of the ways through which data enrichment drives your brand revenue include:L

Enriched Data Improves Customer Relationships

Product data enrichment allows for customized messages and more meaningful interactions with customers and business partners. Your organization can build communication programs that meet the interests and wants of your customers using relevant consumer data features from PIM.

Customers are more likely to buy from you if they believe your company understands their needs.

A single source of truth PIM also helps tackle the following challenges: 

Targeted Marketing

There is an improvement in the success of targeted marketing data enrichment. Targeted marketing is the way of the future, and many businesses are discovering that one-way marketing is unproductive and they have only restricted themselves to a particular audience. To be effective with targeted marketing, a company must use data enrichment to categorize data appropriately.

PIM contains features that will help you target different audiences while maintaining a centralized point for data collection. Through PIM and its data enrichment features, you can target other buyers’ persona with less effort than required to do it manually.

Redundant Data Elimination

An enterprise can lose a lot of money due to redundant data. It leads to a loss of revenue, customers, and a sullied reputation. Because they always feel the need to hold on to some data for future use when they might have let it go, organizations that manually run databases have a lot of redundant data.

In raw data, duplication is widespread, and it lowers the data quality. The PIM enrichment tool reduces data duplication and redundancy, resulting in higher data quality and a clean and organized database.

PIM Automated Features Allows for Multichannel Publishing

Thanks to PIM, you no longer have to publish individually in channels. The software solution’s whole point is to provide your buyers with the most compelling product information.

PIM allows you the connection of your marketing channels to your e-commerce website, from where product data gets broadcasted. In addition to this, not the same information gets published. PIM optimizes product information to appeal to your B2B customers and, at the same time, designs the same product information for more emotionally driven content for your B2C buyers, reducing the cost of individually targeting both prospects with the maximum conversion rate.

Localization Through PIM

Another fantastic way PIM drives revenue to your brand is by creating a single source of truth that can help you target a global market.

Imagine this scenario; your company has created a product that provides solutions to the five targeted businesses. However, your product information was appealing; out of the five, three have become loyal customers. Here is where the problem comes in; after delivering top-notch services to your loyal customers, you realized that there are ten other businesses with needs-fitting solutions you provide, but you cannot communicate with them because of a language barrier.

In addition to speaking different languages, you have not been in the region and therefore have no idea what works or data governing policies. You have no idea what constitutes a good data product, and you now stand a chance to lose ten prospective business partners from another region, invariably, revenue.

With PIM, however, the problem is solved as the system comes with an automatic localization feature, which involves optimizing product data to target different locations through language options while following the laid down marketing principles, which ensures more revenue and brand recognition.

Content Grading PIM

It only makes sense to grade your product page content before revising it to ensure completeness. That is why a grading system for product pages is necessary, if not critical.

When it comes to content, the necessities are easy to find: standard product data, information, etc. However, even the first stage gets challenging for many businesses.

Replacing your manual management with PIM provides automatic content grading features that help businesses check the completeness status of every content field before publishing.

While considering digital assets, PIM rates content based on conventional data requirements and additions such as strength, power, eCommerce SEO, length, etc.

User-Based Access for All Teams

PIM improves your team’s work efficiency and productivity by making it easy to access your system from the comfort of their location, which in most cases speeds up work and increases product time to market. You can enable the feature that gives your teams user-based access through PIM. You get to assign tasks to each team member and allow them only to access that task area.

The user-based access feature will ensure that your organization’s data is smoothly managed and create a conducive environment for every department in your marketing teams to collaborate effectively and manage consumer expectations. When collaboration functions well, creative processes can continue with a short time-to-market, allowing your organization quick access to market share control.

In addition, the single source of truth PIM makes it easier for your sales and customer service teams to serve buyers and prospective customers better.

Suppose your sales personnel is on the verge of closing a sale, but your prospective client needs a little more information to make a very informed purchase. Without bothering the marketing team, such sales personnel can access the database through user-based access to extract necessary information, saving both buyer and salesperson time.

Conversely, with PIM’s centralized system, a customer care representative can answer clients’ questions or queries faster and, in most cases, initiate cross-selling when there is a single source that contains all data they need to go forward with a sale.

Key Takeaways

No matter the number of products your e-commerce sells, you still have a lot of data to track.

Effective management of SKUs, descriptions, photos, videos, product prices, assembly instructions, supplier information, logistics, and more is essential. Most customers turn to online shopping for the abundant information supply and return a product or abandon a product page at the hint of sketchy product content.

As an online marketer, you need reasonable, efficient solutions to keep track of increasing product information with no overwhelming experiences.

You can organize product information in the PIM system exactly how you want it to display on your marketing channels. You no longer need to go to your e-commerce site to rearrange product orders or manually remove or update product data with it. Any of this is taken care of by the PIM system’s single source of truth, and the system automatically reflects changes in all languages and e-commerce platforms channels that you choose to link to the PIM system.

Employing PIM solutions cuts half the amount of time spent on physical labor. There are fewer mistakes and oversights, and every department uses the same data to make business choices, resulting in increased efficiency and revenue from a central location.

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